The instinct to shrink beneath that was old and deep, and Elinor felt it pull at her spine. She straightened against it.
“Nothing of the sort,” Lucien said. His voice remained even, but something sharpened beneath it. “The decision is mutual and amicable. I wish to be clear that Lady Elinor has conducted herself with nothing but grace throughout our courtship. She has been an exemplary companion.”
He looked at Elinor as he said the last words, and the steadiness in his gaze was a gift he was giving her in front of the people who had spent four years telling her she was not enough.
“Well.” Rebecca’s smile softened into something that resembled understanding, though the effort it cost her showed in thetendons of her neck. “These things happen, of course. The Season is taxing, and young hearts can be fickle. I am certain you will find a more suitable match, Your Grace. Someone with a temperament better suited to the demands of a duchy.”
The insult was wrapped in silk, aimed at Elinor while addressed to Lucien, and it landed with the precision of a woman who had perfected the art of cruelty disguised as courtesy.
Lucien’s jaw tightened. For a moment, Elinor thought he would respond, would defend her one more time, but she caught his eye and gave the smallest shake of her head.
He held her gaze. Something moved across his face that looked like a man swallowing glass.
“I thank you for your understanding, Lady Morland,” he said. “I will ensure the dissolution is handled with discretion. Your family’s reputation will not suffer on my account.”
“You are most gracious, Your Grace.” Rebecca rose and extended her hand. Lucien took it, bowed over it, and released it.
He turned to Elinor. The room watched. Rebecca’s smile held. Belinda’s eyes glittered. Joanna’s hand gripped the arm of her chair.
Lucien took Elinor’s hand and turned it over. He pressed his thumb into the center of her palm, a slow, deliberate circle that no one in the room could see, and then he lifted her handand kissed her knuckles. His lips lingered on her skin, and the combination of the hidden touch and the public gesture said everything he could not speak aloud in front of the people who would use it against her.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life,” he said.
Every syllable was true. Elinor knew it. The room heard a polite farewell. She heard a confession.
He released her hand. He bowed to the room. He walked through the parlor, through the entrance hall, and out the front door of Morland House.
The door closed, and the silence that followed lasted exactly as long as it took Rebecca to confirm the sound of his carriage pulling away.
“You foolish, ungrateful, wretched girl,” Rebecca hissed, her voice shedding its warmth like a snake shedding skin.
She turned on Elinor with a fury that had been building behind the performance, her face contorted, her composure gone.
“Mama, perhaps we should—” Joanna began.
“Silence!” Rebecca did not look at her younger daughter. Her eyes were fixed on Elinor. “Do you have any idea what you have cost this family? The Duke of Fairmont. The most eligible man in the ton! And you have driven him away with your peculiarities,your spectacles, your absurd obsession with stars and books and whatever else occupies that overcrowded mind of yours!”
Elinor sat in the chair with Newton on her lap and absorbed the words the way she had absorbed them for four years. Each one landed in the same places, the worn grooves her stepmother’s cruelty had carved into her, and she felt the old instinct rise: pull your shoulders in, duck your head, make yourself smaller, wait for it to pass.
She did not pull her shoulders in. “I did not drive him away,” she said. Her voice was quiet, but it did not waver. “The decision was mutual.”
“Mutual!” Rebecca laughed, and the sound was high and sharp. “No man of his stature mutually releases a woman. He grew tired of you, Elinor. He saw what the rest of us have always seen. A dull, plain wallflower who cannot hold a conversation at a dinner table without boring the guests to tears.”
Belinda, perched on the settee, beamed. Her triumph was so undisguised it looked almost innocent, the way a child’s cruelty looks innocent before they learn to hide it. “I told you, Mama! I said from the very beginning that it would not last.”
“You did, darling.” Rebecca’s voice softened for her daughter before hardening again for Elinor. “And now the entire ton will know. The whispers, the humiliation, the speculation about what she did wrong. It will reflect on all of us, and you,” she pointed a finger at Elinor, “will bear the weight of that shame.”
Joanna stood. “Mama, that’s enough. Elinor has done nothing wrong, and His Grace himself said?—”
“Joanna.” Rebecca’s voice cracked like a whip. “Sit. Down.”
Joanna sat. Her hands trembled in her lap, and her eyes found Elinor’s across the room. The look she gave was apology and solidarity and helpless frustration, all pressed into a single glance.
Rebecca straightened her cuffs. The fury was banking itself now, settling into the cold, controlled disapproval that was far worse than the shouting because it would last for weeks.
“You will go to your room,” she told Elinor. “You will stay there until I decide what is to be done with you. And you will think about the position you have put this family in.”
Elinor rose. Newton shifted in her arms, his claws catching the fabric of her dress. She looked at her stepmother, at Belinda’s satisfied smile, at Joanna’s clenched hands. She looked at the chair where Lucien had not sat, the window where he had stood, and the empty space in the room that still held the shape of him.